Good points on both counts and my lack of nuance is attributable to trying to reply quickly to such a misinformed, adamant post. Here's my sense of how capped buyins developed.
The
smart cardrooms, when they saw that the NLHE tide was unstoppable, severely capped the buyins as a compromise to protect the losing players. You still see this in Southern California, I believe.
The uninformed casinos saw that poker was getting to be a big deal, so dozens of them opened poker rooms. Their clientele want to play NLHE, so they spread that. Much of their clientele would like to buy in for 100-200 big blinds, but much of their clientele believes that anyone starting with a deeper stack has an advantage. So they cap the buy-in to attract those folks, with no real clue why they're doing it.
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Once I was playing $1-2 NLHE at the Gold Strike in Tunica, and this bad player was running pretty good. Every time he won a pot, he'd say, "Now I'm the chip leader!" Or someone else would win: "Oh oh, I'm not the chip leader any more."
Punch line:
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To the other point: Yes, deeper stacks provide an advantage to the best player[s] at the table, but not an
inherent advantage. Rather, it provides a greater scope / deeper volume -- in other words, their opponents can make $1000 mistakes instead of $75 mistakes.
Even then, I think 2+2 people tend to overrate their own ability. In particular, I think 90% of the NLHE forums would buy in deep regardless of the other stack sizes or skill level of the table. But in fact, for deep buy-ins to be good, you need at least one of:
- Skill advantage on the deep stacks. It does little good if the two deep stacks at the table are the two players equal/superior in skill to you. And of course, good players will tend to become deeper stacked more often than weak players. Obviously everyone on 2+2 is the best player at the table, any table, but for mere mortals, this is an important consideration.
- Position on the deep stacks. Almost no one talks about this, ever. It's hard to be profitable playing out of position. If the four players to your right are sitting on $50 and the four to your left have $500, why on earth would you want to buy in for $500? Do you really expect to be so much better than your left-hand opponents that you can profitably play all that money OOP, but rarely IP?
Last edited by AKQJ10; 03-30-2014 at 03:25 PM.